Steelhands

by Danielle Bennett

  I’d have to tell Thom about this, I thought, if I could ever manage to write a decent letter again.

  There was a woman waiting for me at the door, so that I couldn’t very well hang back and ask the driver where in bastion’s name he’d taken me. I’d already made enough bad first impressions for one day, surely.

  “Good day to you,” the driver called after me, taking his hands off the reins to give me a wave-off. “Good luck with them hands. Do wish I’d got a chance to see ’em, though!”

  “Perhaps next time,” I told him, left with a strange feeling of abandonment as he rode off around the side of the palace, the carriage soon obscured by the wall and a group of ornamental trees.

  There was nothing left but to approach the woman, who looked more like a physician than a magician to me, but then, I was hardly an expert. She had a kindly look about her though her attitude was brusque, and she was holding a clipboard with various notes and pieces of paper pinned to it. A pair of spectacles perched on her nose, dwarfed almost comically by her broad face.

  “Hello,” she said, not holding out her hand—a small fact for which I was incredibly grateful. “My apologies if any of this runaround is an inconvenience for you, but I don’t have the same private collection of supplies as my predecessor, and all the best materials are here at the palace.”

  “I’m Balfour. Balfour Vallet,” I told her, bowing just slightly. “And I’m glad to meet wherever you feel most comfortable working.”

  She smiled at that, approval plain on her face. “I’m so glad to hear that, Balfour,” she said, stepping aside to welcome me in. “Please, follow me.”

  SIX

  LAURE

  When I finally awoke, I felt like I’d been dragged behind my da’s plow for a full day during harvest. All my muscles were aching, and my eyes didn’t much appreciate all the sudden light, but it was still better than the way I’d felt the day before, because at least I felt like myself—mashed or no.

  The worst part had been that voice I was hearing. I couldn’t tell Toverre about it because he’d’ve assumed I’d gone crazy, and I’d wake up after the fever’d passed in some kind of institution, arms bound up so I couldn’t hurt myself. But the voice had definitely been there, seeming more real than just a simple hallucination. It sounded like a low whisper, sliding right between my temples—the kind of voice you’d expect a cat would have. And there was a part of it that made me think of fire and metal, too—a distant clang like those that came from the blacksmith’s workshop back home.

  Thinking about it, while I lay in bed and waited for my head to stop pounding, sure did make me feel crazy. Maybe I deserved to be in an institution, after all.

  Must’ve been a bad fever, in any case; I was sweating like a racehorse now that I was awake. The sweat was cold and sticky, and I was tangled up in so many blankets I thought I was going to melt.

  It took a lot of concentration, but I finally got my limbs to move. In a burst of inspiration, I shoved all the covers off me and onto the floor, though one was tangled around my leg and it almost took me down with it.

  “Oh, how marvelous,” Toverre said beside me, his voice a little too loud for my headache to bear. “In thanks for my hospitality, you throw all my covers onto the floor. Well, I suppose I’d have needed to wash them anyway. Still, Laure, I …”

  He paused, and I wished I could open my eyes just a crack so I could get a peek at him. But I wasn’t ready yet—maybe in a minute—so I just turned my face toward the sound of his voice, hoping it looked like I was paying attention. “Huh?” I asked, quite elegantly.

  “I see you are feeling better,” Toverre muttered stiffly. “Just as eloquent as always. You really should never allow yourself to be sick like that, Laure. It is so unseemly.”

  I guessed that meant he’d been worried, so I tried not to get angry at him for being so rude. I also remembered what I’d done—right there, in his room, on his clean floor—and it was hard to be mad at him at all, especially because I couldn’t remember him yelling at me for it.

  “Nngh,” I said. I had to clear an enormous, raspy frog out of my throat before I could manage actually talking, but at least I refrained from spitting something gross onto his floor. “Didn’t mean to worry you, Toverre.”

  “You have a hardy constitution,” Toverre replied, sounding brusque. “At no point did I believe you were anything other than … mildly incapacitated. You were mumbling in your sleep, however, and you missed your lecture today, which means you’re going to have to speak with both the professors. Are you hungry? I brought you some clear broth.”

  “Whoa,” I said, like I was soothing a spooked foal. “Slow down for a moment, let me make sure I’ve got all that.”

  “I merely wanted to answer all possible questions you might have,” Toverre said. “Also, it seems your friend Gaeth is missing. I thought that perhaps the fever—this fever—was so bad it sent him home. I wrote your father—”

  “Oh, shit, Toverre,” I said, finally opening my eyes; I had to shield them with my hands, because he’d opened the curtains and all this bright sunshine was pouring in, like a full-frontal offensive. “You didn’t have to go and do that.”

  “Gaeth might be dead!” Toverre shouted at me suddenly. “You—You might have been—”

  “Now, don’t,” I said quickly. My stomach let out a rumble, and I realized the broth Toverre was holding smelled pretty delicious. He saw me eyeing it and brought it over to me, setting it down on the chair by his bed. “It wasn’t anything more serious than a little fever. But … I’m sorry I said you did wrong. I guess I’d’ve done the same, if you were the one taken ill. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, and I’m glad you were here to take care of me.”

  “Well,” Toverre sniffed, looking away from me. The tips of his ears turned pink, and his cheeks had gone all blotchy, which I guessed meant I’d pleased him a little with my gratitude.

  “I’ll just have to write Da myself and tell him everything’s fine,” I soothed, reaching a pale hand over to the bowl. “I’m feeling a lot better. Just a bit shaky, but I’ll be back to looking after you in no time.”

  Toverre didn’t reply but lifted the bowl and sat in the chair, himself, holding it out to me.

  For someone who never could tell how a person was feeling, he had his moments of knowing exactly what to do.

  “Guess I’ve been giving you a lot of trouble, huh?” I asked sheepishly. “I really am lucky you’re here with me. But what’s all this about Gaeth?”

  I should’ve asked it sooner, I thought, but the fever’d left my brain a little bit stupid, and nothing was working as quickly as it should’ve been.

  Toverre lifted a spoonful of hot broth to my lips and I sipped it without remembering to blow on it first, wincing when it burned my tongue.

  “He’s missing,” Toverre said, not even bothering to be sharp with me about my carelessness. I must’ve looked like the back end of a sow because he was being so gentle with me. “At least, whenever I look for him, he’s gone, and at first I assumed it was nothing, just a matter of coincidence. Only it turns out that others—his friends—have noted his disappearance, as well. Someone named Thib, in particular, who requires him for that beastly game you all play in the hallway, but I know that he hasn’t been to class either, and I … well, considering your condition, and his, and the time I had to think without you to tell me I was being too fanciful …”

  I could tell from the way he was getting huffy again that he was worried, and if I’d been in finer fettle, I would’ve probably tried to feed him the soup to soothe his nerves.

  “Kinda just assumed he was taking his time getting to know the city,” I said, taking another sip of broth, after I’d blown on it this time. At least I learned from some of my mistakes. “But if Thib says he hasn’t seen him in days—and I know we haven’t—then I’ve got no idea what could’ve happened to him.”

  “If he was recalled home, then surely someone would know,” Toverre point
ed out.

  “I hadn’t heard anything about him moving out,” I agreed. “He couldn’t just go and leave all his things behind, either.”

  “You don’t think …” Toverre held the spoon back, apparently unaware that I was leaning toward it for my next mouthful. “Laure, you don’t think he’s run afoul of anyone rough in the city, do you? Or that he might have even … ventured into Molly?”

  “No, I don’t think that,” I told him, reaching over to take the spoon for myself now that I felt a little less shaky. I could see that my getting sick was even worse for Toverre—despite how much he complained—because this way, Toverre’d had all that time to let his imagination run away with him. “Gaeth’s big. He’s not stupid, either. Boy like that can take care of himself. Probably even better than me, but you never heard me say that. Might be the fever talking. Gimme that soup bowl.”

  “Hm,” said Toverre, but he didn’t look all that convinced.

  Not everyone, I thought, was as madcap romance crazy as Toverre. His problem wasn’t just being like that, but assuming everyone else was as crazy as he.

  “Then let’s look for him today,” I said. I was eating a bit more quickly now that the soup wasn’t quite so piping hot, and my stomach was growling loudly every time I tried to think. “He’s got to be somewhere. Nobody just disappears like that. He’s more careful about where he goes and who he talks to than we are. Anyway, we’ve run into him more than once in the city, so I think we probably have a good idea of what places he likes to go and when he likes to go there. It’ll be a little like your stalking, only not as ridiculously creepy.”

  “I have seen the error of my ways with regard to that particular endeavor,” Toverre assured me, which meant he’d be back at it in no time the minute another pretty face crossed his path. “And we will not be embarking on any wild-goose chases before you’ve cleaned yourself up and talked to your professors. If you think it’s bad when I write home for you, I can imagine you won’t want the ’Versity doing it.”

  “You imagine right,” I said, tilting the bowl of soup so I could drain it down to the bottom.

  Toverre winced, and I gave him my very best smile, licking my lips.

  “Good soup,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You are feeling better, aren’t you?” Toverre asked, taking the empty bowl and spoon from me and setting it down on the table instead of immediately spiriting it back to the kitchen to scrub it out. That, more than anything, told me how worried he must have been. It was almost enough to make a girl feel guilty. But it wasn’t my fault for being sick, and I shoved those silly thoughts aside.

  “Well, enough to do all the things you said, and look for Gaeth on top of that,” I said, oozing out of bed. “If he’s sick like I was, and he didn’t have you to look after him, who knows what might’ve happened? Could’ve passed out on the Rue or something, and with nobody here to check up on him all the time …” I shook my head, feeling sorry for him. Being sick like that had been no fun at all, and I suspected even someone as stalwart as Gaeth must’ve had trouble with it.

  Standing up made the world seem a little less dire, and even though I wasn’t about to go dancing through the streets or start up a game with Thib in the halls, I was happy to be feeling more like myself again.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t look like myself. There were big bags under my eyes, and my skin was pale, and when I made a face at Toverre’s mirror, I looked like the ghoul from a children’s story.

  “I really think some inquiries ought to be made into the reputation of that physician,” Toverre said, standing along with me—presumably in case I toppled over, and so he could catch me before I fell on my ass. I’d’ve liked to see him try to catch me. “The things I’ve heard indicate a severe lack of care for one’s patients. I am extremely displeased by her behavior.”

  “Don’t worry; I think I’ll be giving her an earful myself, next time I go,” I said, stretching out my arms before I plodded over to the door. I needed to get back to my own room, change these fever-stinking clothes, and maybe comb my hair a little bit, so I looked slightly less deranged. Maybe I didn’t care about my appearances as much as Toverre thought I should, but I had to draw a line somewhere.

  Toverre paused only to fold up the blankets I’d knocked onto the floor, then followed after me.

  My room was stuffy and hot, and I immediately opened a window to let some fresh, cold air in.

  “Your friend Thib lost consciousness after his appointment,” Toverre informed me, as I dug into my dresser for a fresh change of clothes I could take to the ladies’ while I bathed. “His lady friend told me, though she hadn’t yet had her appointment, so she was just fit as a fiddle. And we both saw what Gaeth looked like after he came back from his. You don’t think it’s another plague, do you? Something to do with the magicians? It’s possible they didn’t cure it—Oh bastion, Laure, why have we come here?”

  “Stop that,” I told him. “I don’t think that’s it at all.” I had one black sock in my hand, but I couldn’t for the life of me dig up the other. Being turned away also meant that Toverre couldn’t see how worried he was making me with all this fearful talk, which normally I didn’t fall for, but he’d finally gotten to me.

  One of us had to be the calm one, and it wasn’t ever going to be Toverre.

  Privately, I didn’t like the sound of it: people fainting dead away in the physic’s chair and coming back with all these fevers. I’d just assumed I’d caught it from Gaeth, but Toverre’d seen him more times than I had and he had the constitution of a newborn baby in wintertime. It didn’t make much sense for me to get sick ahead of him. There was also a chance I’d caught it from Thib. But if by “lady friend” Toverre meant Eveline, and she was still in fine health, then once again it didn’t make sense for me to be the one who got stuck under the weather. I knew how much Eveline liked Thib, and how much Thib liked Eveline, and how unlikely me catching Thib’s fever before Eveline was.

  As much as Toverre liked his crazy theories, I was starting to think he wasn’t so off base with this one. Not that it was a theory so much as it was a group of nasty suspicions. But once we had the chance to talk to Gaeth, I told myself, there was bound to be some simple explanation. Then I could have a good hearty chuckle at myself, and save the mystery solving to the pay-by-hour detectives.

  “Here,” Toverre said finally, elbowing me out of the way with his pointy little limbs. “I can’t bear to watch this miserable attempt a minute longer.”

  Quick as you please, and without throwing anything on the floor the way I usually did, he put together an outfit that passed both his approval and mine, though it involved stockings instead of socks, and one of my newer dresses instead of the plain cotton shift I’d been holding.

  “The green will give you some color,” he explained, all but pushing me out the door, “and it’ll make your eyes stand out wonderfully; you’ll see. And even if you don’t,” he added, with what appeared to me to be just a slight hint of jealousy, “everyone else will.”

  “We’re just going to lecture,” I protested.

  “You’ve been sick,” Toverre said, as if that explained itself. “If you don’t put your best foot forward and make an effort not to look like a pickled herring, I guarantee you Professor Adamo will write you off as weak stock and that will be the end for us. Of course, if what you desire is to cultivate the impression that you’re about to drop dead at the foot of his desk, then by all means, the outfit you’d picked out was a marvelous choice.”

  Somehow, he managed to compliment a girl and gravely insult her at the same time. He was lucky he was attached to me because nobody else in all of Volstov would ever have put up with it.

  I stopped him just short of entering the ladies’ with me, though for a moment there it was a very near thing.

  “You really did miss me,” I said, trying not to sound too smug. “The sound of my voice, my witty discussions, my inability to dress myself—”

  “Do not scare me
like that again,” Toverre snapped, looking quite serious for a minute. “It’s so … impolite. Not to mention that I have a crick in my back from sleeping in that chair all night.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I promised him.

  “See that you do,” Toverre said with a sniff. “I’m going to clean my room now.”

  We’d both feel better after all our necessaries had been washed out. As much as I figured Professor Adamo didn’t give a hoot what I was wearing or whether I’d washed myself that day, it always made me feel more human to sluice off after I’d been sick. It seemed to me like I was washing the sickness off, and even Da had always told me that you could do half a physician’s job for ’em just by using soap and water.

  Well, ex–Chief Sergeant Adamo was probably used to men showing up in fighting condition, too. Toverre was right, and a little bit of preparation wouldn’t hurt.

  I bathed and dressed without any of the other girls needing to use the facilities, which on a regular day would’ve seemed like a real piece of luck, but today just seemed a little eerie. Much as I hated to admit it, Toverre’d kind of gotten to me with all his talk about people getting sick and Gaeth disappearing. He was good at blending in, for a country boy. It was something I’d noticed right in the beginning, but there was a difference between being some trouble to track down and clean vanishing off the face of the earth.

  Which he hadn’t done, I reminded myself. Coincidence was going to explain everything, and we were going to have a good laugh together later.

  But I wanted to find him for more reasons than one. First of all, because he was my friend; and second of all, because I was starting to get the feeling like he could’ve been Toverre’s friend, too, and you didn’t find someone like that on every street corner. He was good to Toverre—even gave him an extra pair of gloves one time to warm his hands—and no one other than me had ever done something like that for Toverre before. It was important to keep this poor idiot around, and Toverre never had to be the wiser for how I’d helped him.